The quiet power of institutions

The least visible structures often decide the most.

Bubal Think Tank10 September 20268 min read

Institutions are the slow variables in public life.

Topics

Why attention became the scarcest resource of the decade
Every platform competes for the same finite hours. We trace how the economics of attention reshaped media — and what it means for anyone trying to be heard.
The quiet return of industrial policy
Governments are picking winners again. The vocabulary changed before the policy did.
What frontier models still cannot reason about
Benchmarks reward pattern-matching. The harder test is judgement under uncertainty.